There are many stories about extraordinary, remarkable, inspiring, amazing women from all parts of the globe who have rebelled, rocked, shaken and changed the world. And this is a good thing.¹ But I want to take these stories further and think about their meaning. In this book I move beyond viewing heroines as women with a singular story whose appearance is random, seeming isolated and out in the cold as individuals. Instead, I am interested in gathering up and making broad connections between heroines across time and cultures. Collectively, what have these women, for all their differences, represented? What are their features as heroines in history? This book moves beyond unfettered celebration to critically look at how heroines’ stories might add up to a dynamic modern archetype of a heroine in history. Significantly, shedding light on what it means to be a heroine in history cuts to the heart of women’s changing place in society through examining how stories of heroines have been ‘instrumental in constructing modern subjectivities and social differences.’²

There is much written about heroes, both around the world and through the ages. These men are portrayed as possessing bravery, courage, physical prowess and mental talent underwritten by their essential masculinity. Their heroic deeds took place in public and were part of asserting confident patriarchal systems of male dominance.³ For example, it was men’s place to fight for and protect women and children. In contrast, as women were largely, and ideologically, located out of view in the home, their lives involved private subservience. They were most commonly cast in a supporting role as the opposite and inferior sex. Their feminine and maternal domain was rarely deemed heroic or noteworthy.⁴

No wonder, then, that women who have managed heroic lives along male lines are known by the grammatical feminine suffix ‘ines’ added to hero. Heroines, as we shall see, were often cast as ‘honorary men’ and were celebrated for emulating male heroic deeds. These were women who became heroes like men, but because of beliefs in essential differences between women and men they remained tagged as the other or second sex. For example, Louise Edwards has examined Chinese women warriors and wartime spies through history. She argues that ‘stories about women’s involvement in wartime action attract instant popular attention all around the world. The vision of a woman killing another human being confronts long-held views about women as life-givers rather than harbingers of death.’⁵ Alternatively, heroines were occasionally heralded as ‘super-womanly,’ elevated to heroic status through their feminine nurturing and caregiving qualities. Such dichotomies and debates over biological difference versus the social construction of gender and sexuality are central to women’s place in the world and are grappled with by heroines throughout this book. I consider whether heroines were able to construct their own sexuality, how they invented a ‘masculine side’ in order to succeed and on what terms they were able to enter previously men-only occupations.

This book focuses on heroines in modern world history during the past 200 years. It chronicles the emergence of women as historical subjects valued for their substance and achievements, rather than as objects valued for their image and celebrity. I consider stories of heroines from around the world since the end of the 18th century when a broad wave of feminism, mostly in western countries, ushered in two centuries of important, if uneven, advances for women.⁶ Liberal demands for women to become equal with men occurred alongside calls for democracy, the end of slavery, class consciousness and a new humanism. As we’d say today, feminism emerged as part of an intersectional context. Of course, in drawing upon individual examples, this book will itself reveal, as Alison Booth argued in her work on women’s collective biographies, ‘comparative bias.’⁷ It grows out of my previous work that argues for the centrality of British imperial heroines in constructing race, whiteness and hegemony.⁸ The intention is that the broad themes identified in each chapter warrant transcultural consideration in modern world history, with constructions of race and ethnicity necessarily always central.

An important argument through this book is that when it comes to heroines in history, there is not a clear cut line between the old and the new. As Joseph Campbell argued in The Hero With a Thousand Faces there is a continuance in the modern world of heroic mythology from the past.⁹ Responding to Joseph Campbell I structure the book around and investigate the presence and importance of recurring patterns for heroines in history that permeate into and receive new meaning in the modern era. Some heroines such as Mulan and Joan of Arc transcend their era, with their stories picked up and reimagined through the centuries. I also critically build upon Carl Jung’s work on archetypes as images, patterns and symbols that arise out of the collective unconscious.¹⁰ At the end of the 20th century the social sciences and humanities largely abandoned essentialist, binary understandings of gender and sexuality in favour of social construction and performativity. For example, influenced by post-structuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault, the work of Judith Butler gained prominence.¹¹ Jung had argued that